Sunday, September 04, 2005

The Joy of TiddlyWiki

There was a time that I really didn’t like wikis, they looked ugly, messy, disorganised and unfocused.

Which actually of most of the wiki implimentations I had seen, was true. But my blanket apraisal of all wikis based on the few I had seen turns out to be wrong. In particular, I’ve started using pretty heavily the stand alone Javascript based TiddlyWiki variant YetAnotherTiddlyWikiAdaptation it’s a single HTML page you keep locally and view in a browser, and this version came with most of the plugins I wanted actually working Including the ability to encypt some of the entries.

Now, I know the encryption won’t stand up to much at the mercy of a determind cracker, but it does mean should I lose the USB key drive it sits on, some scally can’t access my stuff on a whim, and that to me is about the level of security I need. I did for a time use a PGP secure drive on it, but its so much hassle, and not very portable. So since I’m only keeping ‘low level’ passwords, usually sites I log into once a month or less rather then systems passwords or banking details.

On top of the security features, there are some very nice features such as been able to create ‘tabbed frames’ of content, and dynamically create lists based on a tag. So now all my “Next Actions” get the tag “nextaction” and I get a handy list of them all. Another list for “Waiting For”, and another for single “ToDo” items.

I also have another version at work I use for documentation, particularly now every time someone asks me how to use one of my systems, I add documentation about it as well. – So maybe one day I’ll be able to take a holiday without getting a single call from work. ... Maybe.